Inertial Measurement Unit

ATA has designed and built custom Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) for applications including navigation and Line-of-Sight stabilization for systems such as satellites and tactical airborne platforms.

Many systems require precise knowledge of location and orientation, and many have missions that require tracking objects at great distances.

Two or more systems pointing at the same distant object can cooperatively triangulate the location of the object only if each possesses very precise knowledge of its own position and attitude.

Current IMU solutions are somewhat ad-hoc and mission-specific based on performance requirements and limitations of sensors due to size, weight, and power. IMU performance and size are diametrically opposed, i.e., small IMUs have lower-performance and higher-performance IMUs are large.

ATA has designed custom IMU solutions including radiation hardening by design, high-frequency angular rate sensors, a flexible communications interface and computational architecture, and higher-performance in a small package. ATA's IMU solutions comply with new standardized IMU communication interfaces, including MDA-STD-005.

To achieve higher-performance in a smaller package, ATA's custom IMU solutions innovatively fuse an ATA developed magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) angular rate sensor (ARS) with a high fidelity Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) gyro. These two gyros are “fused” via proprietary ATA algorithms in the field programmable gate array (FPGA) fabric. The combination of compact quartz accelerometers with the gyros forms the IMU hybrid triad. Packaging this hybrid triad and FPGA-based fabric processors produces a compact and flexible computational architecture, which affords the flexibility of software and the reliability of hardware.